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Concept
Community of practice
Summary
A community of practice (CoP) is a group of people who "share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly". The concept was first proposed by cognitive anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger in their 1991 book Situated Learning . Wenger then significantly expanded on the concept in his 1998 book Communities of Practice .
A CoP can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created deliberately with the goal of gaining knowledge related to a specific field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop personally and professionally .
CoPs can exist in physical settings, for example, a lunchroom at work, a field setting, a factory floor, or elsewhere in the environment, but members of CoPs do not have to be co-located. They form a "virtual community of practice" (VCoP) when they collaborate online, such as within discussion boards, newsgroups, or the various chats on social media, such as #musochat centered on contemporary classical music performance . A "mobile community of practice" (MCoP) is when members communicate with one another via mobile phones and participate in community work on the go.
Communities of practice are not new phenomena: this type of learning has existed for as long as people have been learning and sharing their experiences through storytelling. The idea is rooted in American pragmatism, especially C. S. Peirce's concept of the "community of inquiry" , but also John Dewey's principle of learning through occupation .
For Etienne Wenger, learning is central to human identity. A primary focus of Wenger's more recent work is on learning as social participation – the individual as an active participant in the practices of social communities, and in the construction of their identity through these communities .
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